Cube
With a shoestring budget, little-known actors, and a tiny set, director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali has created a compelling and gripping movie that will keep you engaged from intriguing beginning to startling end. The film was funded by the Canadian Film Centre, with special effects supplied free of charge by the Toronto visual effects company C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures; it’s an eloquent argument that it doesn’t have to take millions to make an outstanding movie: it takes creativity and imagination and the willingness to take artistic risks.
Cube starts out with one of the most original and intriguing opening sequences I’ve seen in a while. The camera is looking in on a gaunt, desperate-looking man who is climbing through a strange cube-shaped room which has trapdoors in each interior face leading to more cube-rooms. Tension rises; there is something very strange and disturbing going on here…
The premise is the basic one of “strangers must cooperate in order to survive”: six characters (Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, etc) have all awakened in this strange cube with no idea why they’re there or how they can escape. The genius of Cube is that there are real surprises in store for the audience here. For one thing, our loyalties to the characters have to be questioned as the film progresses and personalities (and motivations) are revealed. The film’s events and revelations raise disturbing questions in the characters’ minds, and thus in the audience’s mind, about certain aspects of our society, and our potential complicity in situations that we would normally strenuously protest.
The acting is unfortunately one of the weaker elements of the movie, with an overall amateurish feel. I got a sense of the actors being conscious of “acting out” their roles, instead of portraying them in a natural manner.
Despite the claustrophobically contained location, the story moves along at a brisk pace. Early in the film, I briefly thought “Oh, no. Are we going to be stuck in this cube for the whole movie?” As it turned out, I forgot all about that question as the movie went on. With the story combining the internal struggles of the characters and their external struggle to escape, there were no dull moments. The various dangers that the characters encounter are presented very effectively, so that on several occasions I was practically holding my breath in anxiety for what I feared was going to happen. There are some extremely gruesome moments in the film, made all the more shocking by their sheer unexpectedness. Cube keeps the tension level humming at a high level throughout the whole film, but on a psychological level; when an act of violence occurs, it’s horrifying and shocking because the brutality occurs on a very personal and individual level where the audience relates to it personally, completely unlike the depersonalized, sanitized violence of mainstream action or horror movies.
Cube may be low-budget, but it’s not cheesy. The special effects are well done, including one at the beginning of the film that has to fall into the category of “impressive.” The effects are integrated well into the movie: they’re used when necessary in the story, not thrown in just for the sake of special effects.
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